Striking Pilots!!

As I plan these trips to remote locales, I often times forget that there can be some transit pain involved. As I write this, Ms. Cupcake and I are being thrown around a bit inside an Airbus 330 in a completely typical southeast asian summer storm. Never pleasant.

There is not too much good to say about today. We were really in the middle of nowhere and, as you can imagine, to get from A to B when A is the middle of nowhere, it can take some time. We were up and out of our hotel before dawn to get to the air strip (airport is a bit generous a term) to get back to Manila. Our flight was early because we wanted no doubt that we would arrive back in Singapore tonight.

Turns out that flight wasn’t the issue. As we sat waiting, in my case very impatiently, for our flight from Manila to Philippines, we read the articles in all the papers about how 25 of the Philippine Airlines pilots recently defected (that is the word that the local papers are using) to other international carriers. Therefore, there were flights without pilots. Our already very annoying 6 hour layover became 9 hours. We ate airport dim sum (not good), airport pork buns (good), each read a book cover to cover and then finally boarded our now very bumpy flight.

From 8-4 Transit

We should be landing shortly and then straight to the hotel. It has been a long and irritating day, but tomorrow we’ll explore more of Singapore. Then, the redeye to PNG.